Attempting to save a declining franchise, Paramount tries its hand at animation with Transformers One, with barely adequate results.

Once a box-office behemoth and an easy gamble for Paramount when it came to bringing money into the bank, the Transformers franchise has gradually lost its appeal to the public. Making less and less money with each new entry in the franchise. What’s certain is that Transformers: The Last Knight considerably tarnished the franchise’s (already low) reputation for quality, with an incomprehensible story filled with visual aberrations such as a constantly changing aspect ratio. Since then, the franchise has been doing its best to turn things around and regain an audience it seems to have lost forever with Bumblebee and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, both of which failed to break the $500 million mark, well below the billion mark of the good old days.

By its very existence, Transformers One seems to be a manifestation of the studio’s desire to return to the basics of the franchise and offer something different. Paramount appears to have put all the cards on its side to ensure that this new entry is the right one. With Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4) at the helm, and with Marvel screenwriters Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari and Eric Pearson. All wrapped up in a reasonable budget of $75m, a far cry from the $200m madness of the last films.

Transformers One takes us back to Cybertron, long before the autobots found themselves on Earth, at a time when Optimus Prime was still Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron still D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). The planet is no longer the jewel of energy it once was after a war killed off the Prime Supremes, leaving Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) master of the planet. For the time being, the two friends toil in the mines like many of their fellows, until Orion’s curiosity and discoveries push the duo, later joined by Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key), to hint at revelations about the workings of their world, and increasingly pit the two friends against each other.

For a franchise now in its seventh film, it’s still astonishing how each one has to rely on a mythological object to motivate the narrative and its protagonists. Whether it’s a Cube, a weapon, or a pseudo-Matrix trick, Transformers doesn’t know how to tell a story without bombarding us with mythological exposition about how the Transformers world works. In their adventure to find out the true identity of their leader Sentinel Prime, Pax and D-16 cross some impressive landscapes, but they don’t really mean anything to us, because despite the exposition on the planet Cybertron we’ve had since 2007 and at the start of the film, we still don’t really know what this world is made of. We see some animals, also robotic, but this raises the question of the Transformers’ role on this planet and the place of other species, surely more questions than the film is ready to answer.

Quite frankly, there comes a point when we’ve heard so much nonsensical mythology about the Transformers, their role and their origins that we don’t really question the veracity of what we’re being told. We accept it without really paying attention.

Fortunately, Transformers One ’s dialogue and staging provide a number of occasionally successful comic opportunities. While this isn’t perfect—the Marvel influence in the writing and placement of comic lines in the action is widely felt—it at least keeps us from getting completely bored. Because it will be obvious to anyone interested in the story that Josh Cooley’s work doesn’t exude originality. To say that the story is predictable right down to the dialogue would be an understatement.

Returning to the animation genre after a long absence since 1986, Transformers One aims to capture the toy-like aesthetic that robots had before live-action films. With smooth, shiny armor and steel, as if each robot were equipped with a washing machine. Overall, the chosen aesthetic is not the most flattering for our robots and their worlds. Before long, all on-screen elements and characters blend together to become a collection of indistinguishable particles, especially during races or battles involving numerous Transformers. This chosen aesthetic also prevents antagonists from really standing out from our protagonists, despite some potentially interesting designs.

It’s not a complete failure for Transformers One, which manages at least to tell a halfway comprehensible story, despite a rather unwise aesthetic choice of animation, albeit filled with mysterious objects and exposition, as well as finding a few comic opportunities. Which is already an improvement on its predecessors.